As Benn Jordan has already pointed out to Congress directly, this isn’t just a Flock problem. It’s a problem with a complete lack of basic cybersecurity protocols for these devices.
If we ban just Flock, then the problem will migrate to other companies.
The interesting thing about this, and probably why it might succeed is:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/florida-county-found-11-mystery-173920372.html
So essentially, this opened a door for anyone to put up cameras where they feel like putting them.
Oh yeah I read that. There’s one here in the parking lot I go to the grocery store. It got moved to get a wider angle of the whole area, I might be a dumbass but I can see what they’re doing. These are those parking lot camera things. I’m sure they’ve been retro fitted.
Insane.
Yeah it’s alarming because there’s the protection the cameras, as in the videos we’ve seen of people just recording them getting harassed. And now we’ve quickly reached the point of no one knows concrete details. Then as someone who’s studying cybersecurity, which I will probably give up on honestly, to see how unsecured all of this is makes gear grind. This is like the riding the bike and putting a stick in the spokes meme kind of thing.
Inference is a thing.
Not government.
Only 3 (a minority) are unauthorized police installations. Police in the example in the article are going rogue likely with some tacit support.
What’s left?
Someone with time, money, utility trucks, experience in mounting cameras, someone with networking resources and experience to store and analyze data.
Who is that? This immediately excludes 99.99% of the population. We can infer, assuming the article is not fake news, it’s almost certainly a corporate entity or an estate of a very high net worth individual or family.
We can ask who has the motive and the capability not just to install many flagrantly illegal cameras but also to collect, analyze and use the information?
Mounting unaccountable cameras on public utility poles is an act of war. It’s not a foreign entity, because that would start a big stink if it were. That means almost cedtainly these are our local energy and labor extractors: corporates and/or billionaires (or otherwise very high net worth actors).
It’s kind of like rule 34; I don’t think it’s fake. Also I worked in government contracting for a bit. There’s good and cool stuff and then there’s not. Honestly, I’m not surprised. Realistically, it’s all Swiss cheese. At a certain point no one knows what’s going on.
I think there’s a lot more to it. And I mean there’s some sketchy shit, I discovered–personally yeh messa a nerd–L3 communications was monitoring internet traffic in the early 2000s. Which merged with L3 that makes EoTechs (holo sights). Both G contractors.
Good. This proposed act seems to ban all flock-style camera systems, not just the brand name. This should be a slam dunk for anyone who cares about privacy.
While it’s kind of a ban, to be extremely clear, this is not a direct ban!
This would prohibit federal agencies from using ALPRs or accessing data from them, and it would block federal funding for ALPR systems, but locally-funded systems would still be allowed:
https://www.gadgetreview.com/bernie-sanders-aoc-and-jeff-merkley-just-introduced-the-ban-flock-act
locally-funded systems would still be allowed:
Which is almost all of them.
Also Flock collects and catalogs a whole lot more than license plates. On cars it can of course identify the make and model but it’ll also catalog things like bumper stickers and custom rims for that car.
For people it’ll assign and track your description better than a cop would. Race, clothes, hats…
While I think that trying to do something is admirable, Bernie and AOC fall short on not understanding the complexity of the technology on this one
We need a full ban on passive and dragnet surveillance, both from private and public entities.
On cars it can of course identify the make and model but it’ll also catalog things like bumper stickers and custom rims for that car.
I think the bill covers that. It additionally states that it’s anything that “identifies, locates, and tracks a vehicle through the license plate or other persistent visual identifier of the vehicle”
Which is, unfortunately, why this doesn’t have a good chance of passing. But I’d love to be proven wrong!
Just Flock, or even just traffic cameras? Is this even a start? How about banning warrantless border phone searches? How about recognizing that privacy is a right? The California constitution (and maybe other states) already does that, and it seems to help to some extent, despite the presence of Flock cameras here.
It’s just a block on Automatic License Plate Readers.
Some company will claim they are just recording descriptions of a license plate next and skirts around whatever law might happen (even if this has a near zero chance of happening.)
Needs to include a facial recognition ban.
Uh yeah, that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and sunk.
Like any politician gives a shit about our rights. Wolves in sheep clothes!
Performative bullshit. It only prevents federal use of the data
